This supposes a broader question: what is the purpose of recording information generally?
The alternatives are observing the here and now (boys, obIsland), conversing, or musing / meditating / cogitating on topics.
I'm not hostile to recorded information of many forms, and am in fact something of a packrat myself. But as I acquire archives and observe the increasing enshittification of the Internet as a whole, the value of investing time in searching and saving information only found online and created for online consumption seems ... increasingly questionable.
As I've mentioned in numerous earlier HN comments,[1] my preferred information forms are increasingly more traditionally-published books and articles, highly prepared discussions, or conversations amongst experts within a field (or with a strongly discriminating host and an expert). It's worth noting that the origin of much (though of course not all) online content is in fact discussions based around such works: author interviews or exerpts from books, discussion of articles, etc.
Another principle, and one that seems worth considering in the context of online content, is that false leads and faulty assumptions are absolutely toxic to learning or training in a domain. This turns up in AI contexts, but is also evident to, say, a survey of the history of philosophy, particularly the roughly 2,000 year period in Western philosophy of the dominance of Christian theological philosophy, much of which was based on utterly misguided premises. It wasn't until such assumptions were dropped that scientific and technological understanding really began advancing.[2] One wonders to what extent our present accumulated document[3] trove might actually weigh down future progress.
Or succinctly: What's the balance between retention and study, on the one hand, and observation and reason on the other? Tradition vs. empiricism.
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Notes:
1. Searching my handle with "published books articles" turns up a few dozen of these: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
2. I'm not writing this as an utter dismissal of all theological thought, nor am I asserting that what I'm terming "misguided" was utterly useless. There are useful ideas which emerge, there are religiously-aligned philosophers who arrived at keen insights, the process of working through arguments, even if founded on utterly counterfactual premises, can lead to useful developments in reasoning and logic, etc., etc. That's even without getting to "it can always serve as a bad example". But in this and many other areas it becomes clear that relying on early authorities (in the classical sense of that term) heavily retarded intellectual advances.
3. In the Otletian sense of any type of recorded work: books, articles, images, plastic sculpture, video, etc.